Duomi Music Shuts Down
It’s pretty clear that this company is already on the edge.

Duomi Music, one of the leading music streaming services back to a few years ago in China, has been shut down due to the lack of adequate authorized tracks. In a letter to its users, HIFI brand Sonos, who was a platform partner to Duomi Music, said that Duomi has closed its music service indefinitely.

Launched in 2010, Duomi Music was a Top 3 music streaming platform with 100 million app downloads at its height. In 2014, MAUs and DAUs of Duomi Music reached to 20 million and 4.75 million, and also a top downloaded App. But things started going down after National Copyright Administration of China (NCAC) decided to take actions to regulate the digital music market in July 2015. In the same year, services like QQ Music and Xiami Music, which respectively are affiliated with Tencent Music Entertainment (TME) and Alibaba Group now, got under way to spend a lot of money on music libraries, especially exclusive music works.

Without backing up by titans, Duomi Music was left behind soon after. By 2016, the MAUs and DAUs of the service have already been shrunk to 9 million and 1.5 million. Based on several public reports, Duomi Music has been in loss since 2014. On the other hand, the collapse of the deal between Inke and Shunya International also affected Duomi Music, which was supposed to cash out RMB876 million for Duomi out of the trade. But as the deal failed, Duomi Music got deeply troubled.

To bypass rivals of copyrights, Duomi Music launched a fandom-oriented platform Oops in 2015. With its integral resources, Oops surged fast. In March 2016, the increasing of its users has got by 2+ millions thanks to its presence in an annual event. Before that, Duomi Music was invested by Enlight Media, one of the most well-known media companies, who also is the promoter of Chinese Grammy awards event.

Like any other product, the ultimate goal for it is to make money, Oops was not an exception. In its vision, Oops wanted to make fortunes through some certain business, such as premium membership, value-added services, ticketing service, merchants development and targeting advertisement. Unfortunately, Oops overestimated its platform, not to mention that it was only a newbie. Before Oops, the popularity of its rivalry Yinyuetai had been decaying, which was regarded as a bad signal when it came to profiting. By far of this writing, Oops has been shut down too.

However, Duomi Music didn’t stop retrying.

Revealed from its financial report, Duomi Music has earned RMB5.2273 millions for the last half year of 2017 from live acts business, major of which was ticketing revenue. But its cost also arose up for RMB3.7259 millions yearly-over-yearly, which made its total expense increased to RMB9.1954 millions. But even with the profiting of show business, Duomi Music is still under the pressure of its cash flow and operating cost.

Since the news broke out, Duomi Music has been in silence. Even so, it’s pretty clear that this company is already on the edge.